Man on Fire

26

Ellen threw my wedding ring at me but her aim was poor and it fell at my feet and spun woefully on the floor tiles. I picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my workout bottoms. They were sticking to me and I didn’t know what day it was. I’d stopped recognising the differences between them. It had felt liberating when she wasn’t here. Now it felt pitiful, a sad sign of the distance I’d strayed from the routine things that had once given me shape. The meals Ellen had cooked for me, the little traditions we’d invented so we could feel like a part of each other despite how far we’d come unstuck. Movie night and bingo and the weekly shop. Sunday night pill counts and Chinese Wednesdays.

I realised, powerfully, that we should have made children when there’d still been the chance of them. I should have given us other things to love that wouldn’t rust shut over time like we had.

Ellen had brought the rain in with her. It hung over our heads in the living room while we all sat dripping in a stiff arrangement, blowing the skin off the tea Bibhuti’s wife had cooked. Ellen’s walking stick stood between her legs. Her special shoes were soaked through and puddles were spilling out from underneath them.

‘I didn’t do it to hurt your feelings,’ I said.

‘What, the walking out or the pretending to be dead?’

Her thin lips trembled as she said this and inflicted the words with a sharpness that had been filed over weeks and years of untold resentment. The sound they made came as a shock. Something hateful floated like wreckage in the blue of her eyes. Her patience for me had died and we were both compelled to mourn its passing with verve and uncustomary honesty.

‘Both.’

She told me I looked like shit. I didn’t argue. Barely any time at all had passed since I’d last seen her, but we were strangers now and I supposed we’d die that way.

‘Was there a funeral?’ I asked her.

‘No. You’re not dead yet. Not officially. The police couldn’t find you. They said you’d probably been washed out to sea.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Your bank statement. The flight and the hotel, it was all there. You didn’t exactly cover your tracks. I booked the same hotel. The man said you’d be here.’

‘I should have paid in cash. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘Obviously not.’

I told her she shouldn’t have come. Not in this weather. What if the plane had skidded on landing? How could she come all this way on her own, without me to look after her?

She flushed, squeezed her stick tighter. She wasn’t an invalid. She had as much right to be here as I did.

I looked round at the faces of the family and saw that my lie had burned them. Bibhuti was stroking his moustache mechanically, lost in the effort of recalling the last time he’d been so carelessly betrayed. Jolly Boy sat on the floor at his father’s feet and snapped through the pages of the car magazine I’d bought him from the newsstand across the road. He whispered something irreverent to himself that sounded like an assessment of my character.

Bibhuti’s wife was unchanged. I’d offended her irreversibly the moment I’d decided to take a bat to her husband and reconciliation had never been on the cards.

We listened to the wind and the rain battering the windows. When Ellen finally spoke it was to ask me if I was coming home.

I told her I couldn’t.

I told her things had changed and my place was here. I’d promised to do something and I couldn’t leave until it was done. It was something she might not approve of or understand, but it was a special thing, mine and Bibhuti’s, and if I turned my back on it now I’d die a liar.

I told her our plan and waited for a reaction. She said nothing.

Jolly Boy read aloud about the AMG Mercedes and its gullwing doors. His mother went out to the kitchen to bang some pots together.

‘I know it sounds impossible but we will do it,’ Bibhuti said.

‘He’s got this gift, he can’t feel pain.’

‘I can control pain,’ Bibhuti corrected. ‘I have learned to master it. Also I am very strong.’

‘It’s destiny,’ I said.

Ellen coughed up a hairball.

‘I am giving him a cure,’ Bibhuti said, anxious to help my cause. ‘It has worked on others and it can work on him. There is no need to worry. I will save him. But he must stay to complete his treatment.’

Ellen looked at me fearfully. I told her about the cancer. I went through it all, how I’d been feeling and what it was building up to, making the appointment behind her back and feeling the doctor’s hand up there digging around for evidence. Then the referral and the tests and the news. The brave decision I’d made to run before the news could spread and infect her.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.

‘Because I didn’t want you to have to watch me die. I couldn’t put you through all that. You had your own problems. I just had to get away. I’m sorry.’

She levered herself up from her seat, swatting away my help, and clicked to the kitchen to unleash her feminine sorrows on a sympathetic ear. She paused at the doorway and looked at my face. ‘You should get rid of that,’ she said. ‘It makes you look like a pervert.’

I felt my lip, the patch of fluff growing there. I’d decided to stop shaving in a moment of whimsy, as ham-fisted homage to Bibhuti and as testament to my resurgent manhood. I’d regretted it when the itching had started but I’d kept going with it to save face.

‘Why didn’t you tell me it looked bad?’ I asked Bibhuti.

‘Some things are not meant to be,’ he said. ‘You must discover this as God reveals it to you, I cannot negotiate.’

‘I liked it,’ Jolly Boy said, having worked through his anger and befriended me again. He followed me to the bathroom to watch me get rid of it. The process was fascinating to him, as if I’d given him his first taste of a bullfight. I was the bull. I shaved the thing off and came back feeling brighter.

When the rain stopped I walked Ellen back to the hotel. She felt her way through the thick Indian darkness, along a path littered with the latest treasure from the overrunning sewers. Dead sanitary devices and lost costume jewels and various incarnations of shit. She was the flypaper my lies stuck to and seeing them on her shamed me. I steered her by her elbow to the spot where the old man once traded his gods. His absence hit me like a kick in the stomach. He was gone just like he’d said he’d be. He could have been any one of the raindrops that had fallen on me in the last few days. He could have been a god himself by now.

The picture was gone too. Harshad had whitewash on his hands and the wall was scarred with wire-wool scratches. The heroic figure and the defeated snake had been buried. A sense of jeopardy stung the air, the turpentine smell of dreams given the boot.

Harshad fussed at some paperwork behind his desk, bowed to the books. He couldn’t look his vandalism in the eye. The glass of whisky at his side was full to the brim, a dare.

I asked him what had happened.

‘It was a mistake, I see this now. I do not wish to be reminded. My wife is gone. My friend is gone. The rain has taken him away. Twelve years I am knowing him. I see him every day. Now I will never see him again. I do not want to remember anymore. I do not want to remember anything. I never knew where he went at night. He is happy where he is now but I am in great pain. If I look at this picture every day for one thousand years it will not bring back the things I have lost. I just want to forget them.’

Amrita came out from the back room, clutching a whisky bottle in each hand. She held them up for her father, a prideless catch. ‘This will not make you forget. It will only spoil their memory.’ She let the bottles go. They smashed on the ground.

Harshad flinched. He looked for somewhere to run to but he was stuck in a moment of grim revelation.

‘You are a foolish man,’ Amrita declared.

‘I am a lonely man,’ he said. ‘I am old and tired and I have run out of dreams this morning. They are no good to me. Go now. I will clear up this mess. Go.’

Stubbornly Amrita went to pick up a shard from the broken bottles but her father shooed her away. She stormed out and in her absence Harshad let himself weep, a brief appalling rush of pain that leapt out from somewhere deep down and broke on the air like the snap of a bone. When he looked up it was over. He fetched the mop from out back and began dabbing at the broken glass. My offer of help was dismissed. I stepped aside.

I resolved finally to keep to my pledge of sobriety. I’d never touch another drink again.

‘It was beautiful,’ I said. ‘The picture, I liked it.’

‘Foolish man,’ Harshad murmured. He pushed the mop around until it was sugared with glass.

Ellen turned away when I tried to kiss her cheek and swayed past me into the room. It was identical to the room I’d had. The same brand of loneliness dusted its surfaces. The loneliness of unaccompanied travel and clothes that had seen better days. She didn’t belong here. She belonged where there was comfort and the climate was temperate. She’d never got on well with the heat. Her face was red and her breath came loud and shallow. She slumped onto the bed. I asked after her feet and her blood pressure.

I hadn’t helped with either.

I couldn’t say it, but I was proud of how far she’d come to put a spanner in my works. It couldn’t have been easy, the travelling. If she’d fallen I didn’t want to know. The image of it would be too horrifying to gloss over.

I felt my bad cells tearing round inside me, and I knew I wasn’t going to recover. Bibhuti’s methods weren’t working. There was still pain. You hadn’t bought my argument for mercy. Ellen wouldn’t either. My impatience to live was a betrayal of her. She was too slow and I couldn’t take her with me.

‘If you want to wait for me you can,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back with you when it’s over.’

She shook her head at me. She told me I was going to make up for all the trouble I’d caused. I was going to put things right.

I tried not to touch her while she slept. The hairs on my forearms shivered when she moved. When she started snoring I cried with gladness. In the darkness she was a ship to sail away on and an anchor to my name. Her nightdress was faded from over-washing and she was the only woman I’d loved.

The plaster came off and I hit Bibhuti again. I carried on hitting him until my arm got tired and I had to stop. I stayed away from the bad leg, mixed up my targets to avoid another break. I made his back shine red. Jolly Boy timed me and touched the marks I made.

‘Twenty-two seconds!’ he yelled.

Another bat lay broken at my feet. My hands trembled with something elemental as the rain fell around us.

I hit him. I stretched and swung and every time a bat broke I felt proud. Out in the scorching rain or under the cover of concrete I hit him and hit him and hit him. The neighbours gathered to watch, huddled under their eaves, yelled to us from across the street of the latest landslides and blackouts. Roars went up when another bat was broken. Children were dancing on water, the roads were rivers and we were marooned on an island of splinters. The world twisted under our feet with every collision and we widened our stances to keep from slipping. We kept going until I had no more fight left in me.

I hit him. I got it down to two strikes for a break, across his back. His joy was absolute, a force that rushed in from somewhere hidden and buried our differences. He took everything I threw at him. He was real and alive and he liked it.

I was starting to believe in something, I could feel it growing in the places where my old complaints used to grind. Nature, or Bibhuti, or my body and the things it could do in its last hurrah. My own human fire. I don’t know. But something fell with the rain in that sunken courtyard that made me dominant over the beasts of the earth. I pushed the sky away and you with it.